Tuesday, 8 November 2011

The temple in this wild, out-of-the-way mountain is visited by few people, and the wild deer come so near that when a stag roars in the rutting season, it sounds as if it is standing on the verandah outside. We feel the closeness of the world of nature and the world of man. But here in the temple before the images of Buddha, the animal world touches the divine. The voice of the stag mingles with the chanting of the sutra and the sound of the gong: Vox cervi vox dei.

....Having lighted a candle to the god,On the way back,....The voice of the deer.

-- Shiki

The poet went to a nearby shrine in the early evening, lighted a candle, prayed, and returned to his house through the gathering autumn shadows. Now and again the cry of an unseen deer was heard from the mountain side. What is this strange harmony between the uprising yellow flame of the candle burning like a soul of fire in his mind, and the voice of the deer that comes through the darkness and fades into the distance? The light of the candle is the visible voice of matter, the cry of the deer the audible flame of life. How then should they seem anything but a two in one, a one in two, to the poetic mind?

....Three times it cried,And was heard no more,....The voice of the deer.

-- Buson

From olden times the voice of the deer was deemed a poetic thing, chiefly from its association with love and its lack of fulfilment or sad satiety, but from the time of Bashô it began to have a deeper meaning, a returning to nature for its own sake, as we see in the following verse.

....Hee.........the lingering cryIs mournful:....The deer at night.

-- Bashô

But even here the subjective element is too strong. Buson's verse achieves that subjective-objective level in which we are left without any feeling of reaction against wallowing in our own feelings, and yet not left out in the cold by a pure and artificial objectivity. The voice of the deer has a meaning which is not merely a non-human one, yet it is nameless; it leaves us where we are, and yet enlarges our vision and power beyond this present place.

....The slanting sun:The shadow of a hill with a deer on it....Enters the temple gate.

-- Buson

This is a picture in the Japanese style, but the lines are not static; they have some latent motion. This verse is one of the best examples of Buson's dynamic objectivity.

From a strange old night owl who falls easily into nocturnal silent conversation with the deer in these hills, watching them grow from spring into fall, and now beginning to address the survival of another winter, just out of range of the encroaching rush of headlights, many thanks.

Seeing these photos reminds me that you can't take a bad picture of a deer. We've had the opportunity to get to know some deer very well in our lives and it's been one of the best, most interesting and valuable experiences we've ever had. They're so very lovely and it's remarkable to watch them live together.

We may have seen an albino deer yesterday. She was running across the road and was nearly hit by the car in front of us, but escaped unscathed. It was definitely and albino something. It was bigger than a pony and we don't have many llamas in this neighborhood. Curtis

Thank you my dear fellow deer-watchers. Each encounter is breathless. Let the car not hit them, is the frequent prayer. They come down by night to nibble people's bushes, and are considered a pest as such. (The same is true of possums, raccoons and other beloved terrain-sharing creatures, accused of being carriers of every imaginable contagion.) The beauty of the deer's sensory apparatus has to be among nature's great marvels. I hear poorly, see even more poorly, and so there are always some seconds of deficient awareness on my part. The deer hear, see, and smell, the presence of a stranger (I want to say intruder) long before the stranger becomes aware of them. Our primate strain was built to compensate for a much less alert sensory awareness with a quite well developed capacity for aggression. Though the Roosevelt Elk in the woods are pretty aggressive this time of year about keeping strangers away from their young, the Mule Deer seen in these pictures, our neighbors here, are purely defensive creatures. They are built to outrun trouble. Problem is, the trouble sometimes comes up big and fast and much too hard, in the form of a Prius, Lexus & c. (Perhaps not so many of those hunters to whom Nin alludes, on this side of the hills.) They are also at times pursued down from the hills at night by hungry mountain lions. One late night last year a mountain lion made the great mistake of chasing a deer (large female, c. 105 lbs) down to the block on which sits the high end eatery Chez Panisse. By the time the cops were finished they'd emptied both rifles and shotguns into poor mama lion, who paid the ultimate price for being hungry.

Lovely comments from all, would have been replying earlier but for lost internet connection here on a (more than usually) frayed day at Grey Gardens West.

Vassilis' reminder re. this --

"In the small beauty of the forestThe wild deer bedding down—That they are there!"